Suzy Sureck’s Poetic Dance of Fluid Light and Form

What we see in this world differs for everyone, not just what we choose to see, but how we see and how we interpret it. “Having a good eye” does not always correlate with having good eyesight.

In her book of poetry SEE/SAW (2023), the multidisciplinary artist Suzy Sureck reveals her personal transition from living with myopia and a subsequent corrective procedure to improve her sight. She defined it as “Living with severe myopia, my vision, with its interplay of clarity and blur, shaped my perception and way of being in the world. This changed in the winter of 2022. See/Saw came out of my experience, which was having my vision changed after many decades.

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I dwell in the presence of the absence:
a palpable space that may not be visible.

Sureck, who resides in Gardiner, in the Hudson Valley of New York and New York City, finds her way into the heart of nature – not merely the surface, but the deep essence. She describes it as “the physical and metaphoric qualities of wind, water, and the poetics of shadow and light,” essential elements that speak to our fundamental existence. Her soft dynamic, which is simultaneously tender, subtle and beautiful, evokes the music of trumpeter Miles Davis during his seminal Kind of Blue period in 1959 – subdued, introspective and airy. Miles Davis once said, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play,” which goes to the heart of Sureck’s aesthetic, her self-described “poetics of space with the luminosity of light.” She aptly defines it as “I dwell in the presence of the absence: a palpable space that may not be visible. That is a bit in the spiritual realm, something that I pursue on a subconscious level throughout my projects. It’s that space between light and shadow or light and reflection. It’s the space between mediums, the space between words. It’s minimalism – I think it can occur when there’s spaciousness.” Like Davis, the musician, Sureck the visual and poetic artist, employs simplicity and constraint, a subconscious aesthetic state that is hard to attain. It takes decades of conscious focus to deliberately remove unnecessary elements and to find freedom in illusory space and simplicity.”

Digital Forest /Tread Lightly
Sail cloth, projection, Bluetooth speakers
2022

Suzy Sureck’s works have been exhibited in galleries, museums, sculpture parks, biennials, art foundations and alternative spaces in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Korea, Australia, and India. Recent works include projection performances in the Hudson Valley, Germany and New York’s Lincoln Center. She has been awarded residencies at MassMOCA, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Art Omi, Studios of Key West, Vermont Studios and Arts, and Letters Numbers. Her works have been reviewed in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Sculpture Magazine, World Art, Flash Art and New Observations. She earned a Masters’ Degree in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy in Michigan and a BFA from the Cooper Union. She also studied at the Slade School of Art in London. She lives and works in New York City and in the Hudson Valley. She has also been a longtime educator at the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Sureck works in multiple mediums, including drawing, paper art, video, writing, installations and more. Her work seemingly ties together a playful, free curiosity, with a continuity of intertwining focus on fluidity, light and shadow. She also loves to dance, an element that shines through in her work, depicted in a virtual dance of perpetual fluidity. She calls it “the relation of the body, which I think of as an internal landscape, to our external landscape.” Her art is intricately tied to nature. Having grown up in New York City, she relished the light and natural beauty of the region, which overtly influenced her work. Nature is a point of awareness, an observation, an integral part of her essence.